Trump by name......

Thanks. It was an admittedly confrontational post, but it wasn't intended to simply annoy you!

I'll leave the military analysis now. I don't know enough about it and it's derailing the thread away from Trump.

My bottom line: war = bad

 

Iran tests missile in show of defiance against Donald Trump

And now iran is getting involved too!

 

Says the man who wants $10bn next year to update US nuclear weapons, and just announced a multi-billion dollar arms deal with Saudi Arabia!

 

Meanwhile, domestically, Trump has decided to host rallies cursing (mods: is it still cursing if the President does it?) NFL players; so totally not a white supremacist though. He's directed more ire towards Colin Kaepernik than neonazis. My only interpretation is that he realizes that his presidency is contingent upon racists and those who support racists.

 

Well... why wouldn't they? At this point if they know the Iran deal is falling through and the only way to avoid constantly bending to us demands is to have functional nukes... We've set up some perverse incentives and revealed American foreign policy to be unreliable at best.

 

Sorry to triple post, I had been looking for this essay from Tom Malinowski for a while, about the capacity for soft power to bring down the Kim regime. It's definitely worth a read and a thought: what can the DPRK hope to achieve with its nuclear weapons besides buying themselves time for their own regime to collapse?

How to Take Down Kim Jong Un

 

North Korea is now claiming that Trump has declared war. As time goes on, it seems as if the amount of choices available to each nation are becoming increasingly limited. The likelihood and cost of a miscalculation seem to be rising. I really hope that this amounts to saber rattling.

 

Starship Troopers.

Service guarantees citizenship.

Would you like to know more?

(People getting stuff for free just because they were born in a certain area without contributing anything to their society beyond taxes really bothers me : P)

 

Wow, I thought I was on the last page when I quoted that. It appears I'm a little late. My bad

 

You know the people were the baddies in that flick? Lol

 

Hmm, I don't think there's a clear cut "good vs. evil" in either the book or movie as much as there's a look into military values and a socio-political environment revolving around it. It's the kind of socialism socialists don't want, being that you have to take action as an individual to take part in it and be responsible for yourself. xD

 

Nah dude, in that movie the people are definitely the bad guys, Verhoeven was pretty deliberate about it. Great film, but it was a satire of everything the book was about. The humans started the war, then tortures and killed the bugs, started using fascist propaganda, and even child soldiers. Out and out satire.

 

He always wanted to make a film about a nice bunch of kids who become Nazis, but figured Starship Troopers was the closest he'd get to having the chance because no-one would fund it.

 

Apparently the only way he got away with it was because there was turmoil in Sony studios, and anyone who saw the film got fired three months later. Guy is a rabid anti Trump dude too!

 

Just read an interview on Verhoeven talking about what you're saying.

I watched the movie recently with my girlfriend who had never seen it. It's such a good movie. I don't think Verhoeven hits his intended mark though because you can sympathize with a fascist regime when it's against aliens, something on the scale of threatening the human race. Even if the humans had started the war in the movie, given their nature on how the buys are portrayed and aggressive expansion into space by both species it seems the conflict would have been inevitable in my opinion. It's done in such a fantastical context that I think it removes itself from the historical context it's trying to portray, which is obviously Nazis vs. ::insert non aryan adjective::

You definitely watch the movie and realize you're falling in love with something that has occurred in history that was atrocious. Applied in the manner it was though, it just seems like he misses his mark without explaining the intent (or too many people are is the dumb). Which is why it's an amazing movie, really.

 

I mean, I feel like if it were any more overt it would be guilty of beating you over the head with it. Verhoeven does a good job of embedding satire within a story; robocop's anti capitalism stance never really robs the story of its momentum, and I don't think Starship Troopers is hobbled by its satire either. The characters are sympathetic, and I think you understand their journey from young people who question their place in the world to the military automatons they become. I think that's important and the really scary thing, because if you aren't careful you become a fellow traveler of theirs' and find yourself cheering them on at the end. Really until that first kid comes on the screen, the ending feels happy, uncomplicated. You realize that you've been manipulated by this propaganda film into cheering that the brain bug is afraid and tortured. I think if the bugs were a recognizable, human enemy, this wouldn't be possible. Few people would cheer about a naked man in a laboratory being pierced by probes, no matter what he had done.

 

The movie literally makes you sympathize with the nazis and it all rests on first dehumanizing the enemy. You actually become a Nazi sympathizer - I'm doing my part!

 

Made me remember an "incident" during my school time, when I was rather young.
We visited the city archive, where we were supposed to learn something about the Third Reich.

The man who was responsible for the archive took out some old pictures with several different heads of men.
Then he pointed to some and asked what we would associate with that.
When it was my turn it was a man with a long nose and kind of scary, so I said he looked mean and kind of wrong.

End of story: It has been propaganda pictures, to teach little children back then, how they would recognize the "evil Jew", and that all Jews would look evil, spooky and whatnot.

Even back then it made me realize, how easy people can be brainwashed, especially at an early age.

 

In the same interview I read, he talked about a lot of people missing the point at the time of its release.

Unless I specifically seek out political theme in entertainment, I don't look for political themes in movies. If it is blatantly obvious to where you can't ignore it, I usually stop watching. That's not to say I can't dissect a show or movie into what it's theme and the creator's purpose was is prompted to. This is a compliment to Verhoeven. He does it so well that it can be just a movie.

Again though, I think as far as reaching a broad audience that doesn't look for nuances and not so subtle satire, his mark was missed. You can't dehumanize an enemy that isn't human. You HAVE to be looking for parallels to human history in order to get the message, because if you're not it's just a movie about humans vs. alien bugs, and it's ok to poke and prod and torture the brain bug because it's not human and it's trying to kill all of us. The movie's context legitimizes the fascism in it.

I disagree with the conclusion you come to. Coming from experience unfortunately, many people would cheer about a naked man in a laboratory being pierced by probes, no matter what he had done. It's in our nature, when we "other" our enemy and make them not human. It's why we've been able to do it, and still do it today.

Where's the communist version of Starship Troopers?